It proposes spending at least £100m to bring the derelict station – one of the world’s biggest brick buildings, which closed 25 years ago – back into a workable state before converting it into flats, a hotel, shops, cafes and restaurants. It also plans an energy museum to showcase the site’s renewable energy initiatives.

The remaining 32 acres of the Thamesside site would be developed mainly into flats to the north and offices to the south. The 2.5m sq ft of naturally ventilated offices would be covered by an ‘Eco-Dome’, with air coming in at ground level and exiting through a 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney, dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.

REO, which bought the site in December 2006 for £400m, is determined the scheme should be deliverable, unlike the many proposals from previous site owners.

REO proposes to build a new Tube station at the site, which would be linked to the Northern Line. Its favoured route would cost an estimated £347m, paid for by REO and other large landowners in the 100 acre Nine Elms Opportunity Area.

The 2.5m sq ft of naturally ventilated offices would be covered by an ‘Eco-Dome’, with air coming in at ground level and exiting through a 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney, dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.

Would this work like a solar updraft tower using the convection currents created by the large glass roof to drive turbines in the tower? Its gonna be very windy around the base and quite hot in the building if thats the case.

Will the latest plan for Battersea Power Station, REO’s £4bn, Vinoly-designed ‘Eco-Dome’ become a reality?

Another year, another proposal for the redevelopment of the derelict Shell that is Battersea Power Station and the 32 acres surrounding it.

Yet, 25 years after one of the world’s biggest brick buildings closed, the latest plan by new owner Real Estate Opportunities, revealed today in Property Week, is the most ambitious, the most breathtaking and the most likely proposal so far to see the light of day. For the first time, the owner acknowledges that the relatively inaccessible site needs a Tube station to make it viable.

The highlight of the scheme is an area of five office blocks covered, like Cornwall’s Eden Project, in a plastic dome with a 300 metre-high glass ‘chimney’ that is open to the elements – and which has already been dubbed ‘the Spark Plug’.

Setting out its goals as ‘deliverability’ and ‘sustainability’, which is a lot more that can be said for the many ill-fated proposals from previous site owners, first John Broome and then Victor Hwang, REO aims to develop 8m sq ft of flats, offices, shops, hotels and leisure facilities. The estimated cost is a dizzying £4bn.

A community consultation, for which a suite has been created on the site, will begin on Monday 7 July and a planning application is due to be lodged at the end of this year or beginning of next.

Unknown quantity

REO is not a household name in the UK. It is 67% owned by Irish developer and investor Treasury Holdings, which employs more than 500 people, is the largest western investor in China – through AIM-listed company China Real Estate Opportunities – and prides itself on its Green development credentials.

Treasury has a dedicated environmental division, which employs around 30 people, and is developing the 50m sq ft Dongtan, the world’s first ‘eco-city’, near Shanghai.

The Battersea masterplan has been designed by Uruguyan architect Rafael Vinoly. He envisages 3m sq ft of flats in the power station, around the glass chimney and in separate blocks to the north of the site near the River Thames, 2.5m sq ft of offices, 1m sq ft of hotels and serviced flats, 900,000 sq ft of Covent Garden-style retailing in the power station and 500,000 sq ft of leisure and cultural space.

To offset the square bulk of the power station, the buildings around it are fluid, curvy and stepped. The power station appears to rise above manmade lakes in a ‘halo’ that Vinoly has designed to surround it. The public spaces, including a riverside walk, and residential blocks will be to the north by the Thames and the domed offices to the south.

Watching Vinoly discussing his plans on the marketing video, while standing on one of the few dry bits of land within the derelict power station, is to realise the enormity of REO’s task.

Rob Tincknell, the managing director of Treasury Holdings UK, which is the external manager of listed company REO, says Battersea ‘is the biggest regeneration opportunity in London left today’ but acknowledges that there are enormous site constraints. These include railway lines, gas holders, the Thames Water Ring Main – which runs under the site – views that have to be protected and public access.

But by far the biggest constraint is the crumbling power station, which stands right in the middle of the site and requires at least £100m spent on it simply to return it to a workable state. Once that has happened, Vinoly’s design envisages flats on the top level, a designer hotel below and shops, cafes and restaurants at ground level in the two turbine halls. An energy museum would also be created to showcase the renewable energy aims of REO.

Sustainability is the key theme for REO. ‘It will be the UK’s first zero-carbon scheme,’ says Tincknell. This is a neat twist – after it opened in 1957 the power station pumped out 500 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 14 tonnes of sulphur dioxide every hour, giving it, without doubt, the largest carbon footprint in London.

This will be achieved by REO producing its own renewable energy for the site in the power station and creating office buildings that will be the first in any UK city to be naturally ventilated.

The buildings will be under an ‘Eco-Dome’ covered in ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, known by its abbreviation, ETFE. It is the polymer that has been used at the Eden Project in Cornwall, Terminal 5 at Heathrow and the Allianz Arena in Munich, home to Bayern Munich football club. Air will enter the dome and the offices via vents at ground level and exit through the 300 metre-high, 32 metre-wide chimney. The roofs of the office blocks, which will be in a hot pocket of air at the top of the dome, will be turned into tropical gardens.

Tincknell says the offices will produce only a third of the energy of a typical UK office building – 113KWhr/sq m/year – and will be attractive to the increasing number of occupiers with a corporate social responsibility agenda.

Route and branch

While it may tick all the sustainability boxes, the scheme is not viable unless a new Tube station is built, as 4,000 residents and up to 25,000 employees – not to mention daily visitors – could not be catered for by the existing network of buses and mainline trains.

As Tincknell admits: ‘If we don’t have significant improvement in public transport, then we will have to rethink our plans.’

REO has come up with three route options for an extension of the Northern Line in a spur from Kennington. Its favoured route would cost an estimated £347m and would have two stops, Wandsworth Town and Battersea. It would be entirely paid for by REO and other local landowners, working within the Nine Elms Opportunity Area .

Tincknell believes that this large contribution by REO in addition to the heritage and cultural attractions it will provide should count in reducing the amount of affordable housing it should provide. If not, the scheme becomes financially unviable and another Battersea Power Station proposal will bite the dust.

A £4 billion masterplan to save Battersea Power Station before it collapses was unveiled today.

The project includes a 1,000ft-high glass tower - taller than Canary Wharf - next to the instantly recognisable brick landmark. There will be more than 3,000 homes, shopping malls, a boutique hotel and a "green" office quarter.

The plans also call for a new spur off the Northern Line to link the power station site to the Underground network.

The Irish developers, the third owners of the power station since it was decommissioned in 1983, describe the scheme as "the most exciting real estate proposal ever to come forward in Britain."

Its most radical element is the transparent canopy over the office development officially known as the Ecodome, but already dubbed "The Funnel".

The Funnel, the brainchild of Uruguayan architect Rafael Vinoly, will be topped with a huge glass chimney and will provide its own "natural" air conditioning to the development, hugely reducing its electricity needs.

Developer Treasury Holdings UK says it is essential to make the whole project carbon neutral. If it gets the go ahead, the Funnel will be higher than any structure now standing in London when it is completed in 2019.

It will tower above the 771ft One Canada Square at Canary Wharf. The developers insist that the transparent dome, to be made of a similar material to that covering the Eden Project in Cornwall, is not a building but a "solar driven natural ventilation system," the biggest of its kind in the world. It will cover a 2.5 million square foot office development which will have only a third of the energy needs of conventional offices.

The sun will heat the air under the Dome, causing it to rise up the tower, known as the chimney. That will in turn suck in air from outside the glass canopy, which will will stop at thirdstorey level, creating a constant breeze that will cool the offices.

The chimney will surround apartments up to 240 metres but the top 60 metres will be an empty glass tube. The absence of electricity-hungry air conditioning will help the developers achieve their target of carbon neutrality, making the project hugely attractive to "progressive" tenants such as Google and Apple that the developers hope to attract. Rob Tincknell, managing director of Treasury Holdings UK, said: "This is not a token gesture, it will make a serious dent in the level of emissions.

"The annual carbon reduction is 80,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, the same as a town the size of Newbury."

On either side of the power station will be three large apartment blocks, built "no higher" than the base of the chimneys. In total there will be 3,200 homes on the site, a huge advance on the 750 proposed by previous owners Parkview. Today's proposal is the latest in a long succession of plans to find a use for the 83-year-old p ower stat i on. All have foundered because of spiralling costs and the fast deteriorating state of the building.

The latest project is likely to be the last chance to save the world famous "cathedral of industry" with its four white chimneys towering over the Thames. It has stood abandoned for 25 years and is in desperate need of repair work. The chimneys, which are suffering from concrete rot, will have to be pulled down and replaced by replicas.

The restored power station will be at the centre of a 38-acre site with eight million square feet of shops, apartment, cafes, offices and a hotel.

The developers want to create three floors of shopping with many independent stores "to give it the feel of a Covent Garden or a Neal's Yard." and a two-storey hotel.

The developer and architects of the proposed redevelopment of Battersea Power Station and its surroundings are not short of cojones.

Treasury Holdings and Rafael Vinoly's plans for the most blighted large site in central London are based on the assessment that what it really needs is a 1,000ft glass tube, the largest tower in Europe, containing for the most part nothing but air.

It seems to be spectacularly, riotously, extravagantly nuts.

This tower will sit slap behind the Palace of Westminster in protected views from Hungerford and Waterloo Bridges, calling into question once again the Palace's status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

It will stand in a neighbourhood not noted for skyscrapers. It will dwarf the listed power station next to which it will stand. And it is being proposed weeks after the triumph of the tower-sceptic Mayor Boris Johnson and his planning advisor Sir Simon Milton, for whom this is surely the perfect opportunity to prove their mettle by shooting it down.

At its bottom the tower spreads out into a kind of gigantic glass skirt containing 2.5 million square feet of offices, the equivalent of five gherkins, in a single structure that would have to be built all at once.

This in an area that is far from being an office hotspot and which, even with a proposed new Northern line spur linking it to Kennington station, will not be well connected. The current economy is also not propitious for such a scheme, though here Treasury Holdings can reasonably claim that, by the time of its projected completion in 2018, things might be looking up.

Usually office developments are built in stages, moving cautiously forward only once the first parts have found tenants. This would be, by a wide margin, Britain's largest single office construction to be built in one go. It is proposed, moreover, in a death zone that has defied successive property booms and has now stood empty for longer than it was fully operational as a power station. Vinoly starts his description of the project by citing the obstacles to development — the cost of building transport links and restoring the old power station — but he then creates what looks like another with his giant glass tube.

It is, to be sure, different from the other towers recently proposed. Most of these are giant crates of office space or flats, packed to capacity, leaden of demeanour, styled with swoops and curves in an attempt to look “iconic”. The rationale of Vinoly's tower is environmental: the aim is to make a “zero-carbon” development, including naturally ventilated offices.

One way to achieve naturally ventilated offices is to create chimneys which, as hot air rises, naturally pulls drafts through buildings. The Battersea chimney would cool a very large number of offices, and is therefore the largest such chimney ever built.

The creation of a big empty tube, wrapped only with a certain number of luxury flats, is in defiance of all known rules of property development — don't build empty space; maximise the amount of “net” or useable floor area — which makes Vinoly's proposal more charming than other tower proposals.

Its daring also makes it more attractive than other towers. Might this be the sort of truly visionary work that Britain repeatedly fails to achieve? If the Mayor turns it down will this be another triumph for our reputed small-mindedness? Why not, just once, create something as extreme as this?

Here's why. I don't doubt Treasury Holdings' desire to create a zero-carbon development but this can surely be achieved in other ways than a 1,000ft tube. The suspicion must be that it is a tower because that's what architect and developer wanted, a suspicion backed by rumours over the last year that towers were part of the plan from the beginning.

The tower, therefore, becomes a monument to architectural and developmental ego. A marketing tool for an office development becomes the biggest thing on the skyline, making its mark on the Houses of Parliament. Battersea Power Station is already a substantial icon in its own right: so what need is there of this giant rival?
Then there is the likelihood that, even if it wins planning permission, it will never be built. Towers are riskier and harder to get off the ground than other forms of development, being slower and more costly to build. For the past few years we have repeatedly been told of the need to build towers yet many that have been permitted are not going up. The Ozymandian scale of the Battersea tower increases the chances that at least part of this place will remain empty for another generation.

It is intriguing that Treasury Holdings is betting on such an apparently bonkers idea, as neither the company nor Vinoly is stupid. Maybe there is some industrial poison lurking in the Battersea soil, which causes its owners to lose any sense of proportion and propose ideas like the theme park and the shopping-mall-cum-acrobatic-performance-space, previously put forward for the place, that have since bitten the dust.

It may be that they are true visionaries. It may also be that they are trying it on. It may be that they are proposing something so big in the expectation that any future proposals for the site will look reasonable by comparison. They may be trying to distract attention from the not-tiny 20-storey residential blocks that are also part of their scheme, and from the fact that they want to put twice as much accommodation — eight million square feet — on the site as a whole, than was previously proposed.

We can also be sure that the plan was conceived with a different Mayor in mind, one who would have been armed with enhanced powers to push a scheme like this through. Ken Livingstone, with his love of towers almost anywhere, would have looked more kindly on the plan than Boris Johnson, who believes towers should be concentrated in places where they are already common, such as the City and Canary Wharf.

So the message to Treasury Holdings, and to the Wandsworth planners and the Mayor, who must judge their scheme, is this. Forget it. Do not try to compromise with a tower two-thirds as high. Do not build a tower. Aim for zero-carbon and beautiful buildings but concentrate on making a decent neighbourhood. And on something that will actually get built.

The Battersea tower seems destined for those books on unbuilt London that include a straightened Thames, a tower on top of Selfridges, and plans for inhabited bridges. In saying this I may be putting myself in the category of those who laughed when Christopher Columbus told them that the world was round. But I don't think so.

it is beautiful. Zero emissions, high density! This is London not the Evening Standard! Hopefully by the time the financing and planning debate comes around, the old fogies at the evening standard, and Boris's chums will all be pushing up the daises

"It will tower above the 771ft One Canada Square at Canary Wharf" Haha I love height creep it makes the conseervationists look so dam stupid.

I think this is the one scheme where if we all get in early enough we could combat the inevitable dreary Nimby onlslaught

I cant believe people like Rowan Moore get paid to sprew out their dulled senses all over the population.

First he goes through all the innovative pollution and energy saving parts of the scheme while skipping over the fact that the much loved Power Station will be saved and then has the audacity to push all that aside with his political prejudice and then condescendly mentions that people wont want to the live there as a community.

The man should be kicked out of London for good.

"The Battersea tower seems destined for those books on unbuilt London that include a straightened Thames, a tower on top of Selfridges, and plans for inhabited bridges. In saying this I may be putting myself in the category of those who laughed when Christopher Columbus told them that the world was round. But I don't think so"